Adam Turner is an award-winning Australian freelance technology journalist with a passion for gadgets and the "digital lounge room".

Attorney-General Senator George Brandis wants to point the finger at pirates. Photo: Andrew Meares

Brandis wants to wield a bigger stick, but can the government's piracy war be won?

After months of speculation, federal cabinet will reportedly consider proposals as early as this week to crack down on illegal downloads. Options on the table include issuing warnings to people who repeatedly download illegally, as well as forcing Australian Internet Service Providers to block file-sharing websites such as the Pirate Bay. It's hard to see these measures doing much to turn the tide of piracy in Australia.

The government's renewed war on piracy comes amid a revamp of Australian copyright law, although Attorney-General George Brandis seems more interested in protecting the interests of big business than actually bringing Australia's copyright laws into the digital age. Brandis baulked at the idea of US-style Fair Use copyright laws designed to grant extra rights to end users. Instead he wants to focus on protecting the rights of copyright holders via web filtering and legal threats.

Brandis has been laying on the anti-piracy rhetoric rather thick, as have people like Village Roadshow chief Graham Burke – who recently attacked Google for daring to suggest that online piracy is "primarily an availability and pricing problem" which won't be solved by harsh but ineffective regulation. Last year a Federal parliamentary committee actually urged Australians to bypass geo-blocking to escape the Australia tax on hardware and content, but Brandis still believes the answer to piracy is simply to wield a bigger stick.

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Brandis has spoken of laws which "ultimately require ISPs to ‘take down’ websites hosting infringing content", but surely he realises how pointless this is considering that the bulk of piracy sites lay beyond Australia's jurisdiction. Blocking such sites is more feasible than trying to get them taken offline.

Of course blocking sites like the Pirate Bay is also a futile gesture, as bypassing government-imposed filtering is child's play thanks to the range of free and paid proxy servers which bypass filtering and Virtual Private Network services which mask your internet traffic from your Australian ISP. The government couldn't crack down on VPN usage without impacting on legitimate business users.

The Pirate Bay isn't the only BitTorrent search engine in the world, and the Great Firewall of Australia would have an impossible job on its hands trying to block them all – just ask foreign lawmakers who seem to have lost their battle against BitTorrent search engines. Of course the nature of peer-to-peer networks like BitTorrent means that they can't be crippled because there's no central point to attack.

BitTorrent is far from the only peer-to-peer file-sharing network popular with pirates. Along with peer-to-peer networks, Australians can also turn to Usenet, a wide range of MegaUpload-style file storage services and a vast number of direct streaming sites like Watchseries.It. History has shown that if you cut one head off two more will take its place – a lesson which often seems lost on lawmakers more interested in making noise than finding constructive solutions to problems.

The alternative to blocking piracy sites on the internet is to block people from using the internet using graduated response "three-strikes" laws. After a few warnings for illegal downloads you're slapped with a fine or perhaps even have your internet access cut. Copyright giants such as Village Roadshow lost their court battle with Australian ISP iiNet, but there's still room for the government to step in and legislate.

Local copyright groups have shied away in the past from taking a hard line and attacking pirates in their lounge rooms – a tactic which turned into a public relations disaster in the US. Back in 2008 the head of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft publicly admitted that the group has no interest in prosecuting file-sharers. Behind closed doors, they're reportedly still reluctant to go down the path of actually disconnecting people.

It remains to be seen how draconian Attorney-General Brandis' three-strikes proposals are, but they're unlikely to deter pirates when it's so simple to evade detection in the first place.

What do you think is more effective in combating piracy, the carrot or the stick?

202 comments

Copyright owners continue to rip off Australian customers by overcharging compared with other markets. I prefer to buy legal copies but do so via the UK because a DVD costing nearly $30 here can be purchased for a pound or two on UK web sites. Many sites will not sell to Australian customers but I am fortunate to have UK friends who are happy to act as forwarding agents.

Commenter

BB

Location

Western Victoria

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 11:06AM

You hit the nail on the head.

The government should be looking at why media is more expensive in Australia, and representing their voters. They should look at why Foxtel costs so much, and why Planes cost $28 in Coles.

Unfortunately this government was promoted by Murdoch and News Ltd. So the reforms that come will be in favour of businesses owned by Rupert Murdoch instead of the Australian consumer.

Commenter

Mark

Location

Elsternwick

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 12:11PM

Thats not what is proposed. Parallel imports are legal. Downloading a stolen copy using bittorrent file sharing software isnt.

Commenter

Paul

Location

Sydney

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 12:16PM

Now listen up George- we in the bush don't get access to much content. Heck, very often we don't even get tv signals where I live so making downloading illegal is going to hurt us. It's an hours drive to the closest cinema for us here and what if the film is crap eh? That's twenty dollars plus fuel money down the long drop for just one ticket.

You can't argue that we are spoilt for choice nor can you argue that hollywood is suffering when in reality the studios made more last year than ever before.

# Please leave this be George and fix something else instead. Going after service providers will just lose you REAL votes when the service providers crack down on the likes of me.

I in turn have will have no choice but to send a message back to you, seeing as how you forced this.

##### if it ain't broken don't fix it George.

Commenter

Alex

Location

Finley

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 12:17PM

It's crazy to think that you still have to do something like this in the 21st century. The technology to simply download it legally has been around for over a decade but unfortunately the business models are still stuck in the 20th century. And it looks as though our Attorney-General is happy to play head thug for the distribution industry (luddites of the information age?).Let's face it, the distributers/ middlemen are just manipulating our laws so that they can monopolise the distribution of media and increase profits by increasing scarcity. Of course they can't do this naturally anymore due to modern technology, so they need to hire our police as thugs to do it for them.

Commenter

Scott

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 12:33PM

Watching Game of Thrones legally in the USA - $2.60 per episode on iTunes.Watching Game of Thrones legally in Australia - $52 per episode on Foxtel.Who are the real thieves?

Commenter

Grant

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 1:10PM

Its ironic that these conservatives who are always harping on about protecting people from the Orwellian state want to turn ISPs into surveillance agents of the state. I can't imagine anything more big brotherish. After the Snowden revelations, we should be concerned.

Then again, the conservative obsession with privacy extends, in practice, only to keeping the eyes of the tax man out of the bank accounts of the rich.

Commenter

Andrew

Location

Fitzroy

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 1:16PM

@ PAUL I think the point is that distributors make parallel imports as difficult as possible so they can eliminate competition and enforce their own regional pricing. This 'should' be illegal (as it's anti-competitive) but isn't enforced and yet they expect to use our taxes to enforce their own monopolies and questionable pricing policies.The vast majority of people are willing to pay the artists/creators, but we refuse to be ripped off by middlemen for the pleasure. Like Luddites, the middlemen are using politics to fight technology just to justify their own existence.

Commenter

Scott

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 1:17PM

Accounts receivable is always conveniently located in another country such as Ireland when it's time to pay tax.When it comes to pricing the product then it's a different story.When you go to claim damages from the poisons they unleash into the environment with impunity they are a faceless corporation.When they are losing revenue they are a victim and they want to enact special laws without due process to suite their individual needs.

..... ???

Commenter

Nicolas

Date and time

May 05, 2014, 1:48PM

@Paul,Parallel imports are legal, but the industry ensures that the retailers will not breach their rules.